


There are only patterns

by robaca (goodlamb)



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Aggressive Use of the Word 'Fine', Canon Compliant, Episode: s02e01 In the Shadow of Two Gunmen: Part 1, Episode: s02e10 Noel, F/M, M/M, Multi, Non-Graphic Violence, PTSD, Political Campaigns, Shooting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-17 14:14:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5873629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodlamb/pseuds/robaca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A shooting on the Santos-McGarry campaign trail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Chuck Palahniuk quote.
> 
> (So, I've kind of gone down a West Wing hole. I consumed all seven seasons over the course of my winter break...in about 30 days...I'm viewing this as West Wing just sort of "happening" to me, idk. I'm a big fan of Josh/Matt(/Helen/Donna) so this could possibly be viewed as pre-slash for that? Idk. Idk idk idk. This fandom has so much good fic...it's all from like 2005...I'm reading so much Sam/Toby. What's happening to me.)
> 
> (I was? 10 years old when this show ended, guys. What's happening.)

Overall it happens faster than he thought it would.

Not that Matt was expecting it, per say. No one expects a lunatic with a rifle they bought at Wal-Mart to come around firing it at your head. But there was something to be said for knowing thyself (his self being the first Latino nominee for President of the United States, in a country where the Minutemen militia exists) and knowing the world around you. That coupled with the fact that, though he was getting eerily used to their presence, the dozen or so people in black suits that shadowed him and his wife and children weren’t there for show— together it gave him a sort of buzz that was too constant to ever really register as fear. Similar to the feeling he remembers from the Gulf.

But funny enough, none of those preternatural senses, none of the ingrained instincts that’d he’d gotten as a soldier under fire— none of that comes into play in the way he’d imagined it would. That’s what’s killing him: it all went down so fast, he hadn’t even seen the shooter, or which direction the unmistakable blast came from. One second he’s shaking hands with a screaming teenager in the crowd, her face painted red, white, and blue, and then he’s being pushed into the car with what feels like all the manhandling deserved of a checked bag at an airport gate. His ears were ringing and he was coldly puzzled at the familiarity of the sound.

“Where’s Helen?” he shouted, he remembers shouting. “Where’s my wife?”

Some agent or another (Henry, Sully, Gladys, he’s only known them so long, it’s hard for him to think that he puts his life in the hands of these strangers) says, “Mrs. Santos is in the car right behind us.” Time skips as the agent checks in with his earpiece. Matt’s eyes roll around the town car. He can feel his heartbeat in his temples. That teenager, with the starry eyes and the face paint, had someone pulled her down? Back into the safety of the crowd?

“I didn’t even see where they were coming from,” he says, in a daze.

“It was one shooter, male, Caucasian, mid to late 40s. He was on the other side of the plaza.” The agent (Bill, he’s pretty sure, Bill) puts a finger to his ear again and it feels like something out of a Bond film. God, what was he doing here, a kid from the Second Ward. “I’m being told we have him in custody.”

“Anyone shot?” he asks breathlessly. He feels himself tightening back up. He can’t lose focus at moments like these, he reminds himself, not now, and not when he makes to the situation room.

“No reports of injuries yet, sir,” and he realizes here that Bill is half shouting inside the car, as they careen down the road. Other than that the man seems alert, but perfectly calm. “Suspect was armed with some kind of double barrel shotgun, he fired off twice before he was brought down.”

Matt shakes his head to clear it. “Where’s my wife? I want to see my wife!” Helen had been only paces behind him, talking with Donna and Lou about their next campaign stop.

“Protocol is to get you both to a secured location, which right now is McClarett’s field approximately one-point-five miles from the convention center.”

Matt was frowning. “Not the hotel?”

The agent shakes his head, saying, “Protocol is to treat headquarters as compromised.”

“Protocol,” Matt says, dully.

“Yes sir,” Bill replies, still shouting.

 

 

They do indeed dump him in a field, on the trampled remains of cornstalks; there are even cows in the distance. And he’s immediately surrounded, of course, by a wall of black suits.

It’s a tense few minutes, waiting for Helen’s car to arrive, feeling useless as he stands on top of corn in shiny black loafers. The moments right before the blast are coming back to him now— the girl, the face paint, Josh, Josh Lyman in his ear going off about some poll about Nebraska’s PR response to fracking, Ronna trying to hand Josh something, and him thinking, God can any of you just let me talk to the screaming people with the face paint?

Helen, coming out of the center doors, probably doing her debutante grin-and-wave (though if his very blonde, very Texan wife ever heard him refer to her as a debutante he might make history as the first Latino and first divorced President of the United States). Her, with Lou, with Donna, and he didn’t know who else, who else of their people…

“Is there any update? Any casualties?” he asks the wall of suits again. He’s feeling antsy. He wonders if they’d tackle him if he turned and stalked off into the woods.

“No, sir, it doesn’t look like it. One shot hit the roof of the vehicle.” And, shit, as he looks now, there are two agents inspecting the passenger side of the car they came in, one of them photographing the neat torn spot of metal. The agent talking to him (he’s pretty sure this one’s Wendy) continues, “The other shot went into the air as he was brought down.”

Matt blows out a stream of air as he tries to settle down, tries to keep himself from asking for more information, wanting an update every second on the second. Really he’s amazed they have so much to tell him already. Dazedly he recognizes the whole thing took place than fifteen minutes ago.

Finally another black town car, identical but for the bullet wound, pulls into McClarett’s goddamn Field.

The door swings open, and out climbs…Josh Lyman.

Josh takes in his shock, and says, stumbling over himself as he says it, “Ah, yeah, I just uh, got tumbled in along with her.” He reaches back behind him and takes the outstretched hand of— Helen.

The suits part easily in front of him as he rushes towards her, and takes her firmly against his chest. She’s fine. She’s fine.

“I’m fine,” she’s saying, and her voice is a little hoarse, maybe, but she is, fine. He pulls back from her just enough to get a look, and she’s barely rumpled, her face pale under the camera-ready makeup but otherwise completely perfect, down to every last hair of her chignon. Matt lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding for the last fifteen minutes.

“We’re waiting on one more car,” an agent tells him, and Matt doesn’t even bother grasping for the name of this one, just nods at her as he holds onto Helen, stroking her back through her blouse.

This car comes quicker than Helen’s had. Or the time passes faster, knowing she’s safe. He spends the minutes holding her, leaning back against the car (not thinking of the hot iron that only just skid off the window). He watches the field around them, the bright midday sun that seems blindingly colorful compared to the sterility of the fluorescents from the convention center, or the darkness of the back of the car. He watches Josh, too, as the man gives him one of his close lipped smiles, the one that uses up his whole face. Then he stands there with his hands in his pockets, his whole body bent into a curve in support of him staring at the ground.

Matt strokes Helen’s back, listens as her breathing starts to slow, even as it catches and hitches every now and then.

The final car pulls into the field at less of a breakneck speed, and feels like an anticlimax. But the shining doors open again and out tumbles—

“Josh!” Donna’s shouting, as she steps out onto the grass. “Josh! _Josh!_ ”

And for whatever reason Josh doesn’t rush to her, like Matt ran for Helen. Josh looks up and his expression is caught in boyish surprise, a look Matt can’t remember seeing too often on his campaign manager’s face, but he otherwise seems caught there, in the bent-forward curve, hiding his hands in his pockets.

It doesn’t matter. Before Lou can even climb out behind her (and he does watch the sour-faced woman step out onto the field in her black pumps), Donna is already across the space between them, barreling into Josh at full speed. He catches her immediately as she wraps herself around him like a limpet.

She’s crying, loudly, wetly, obviously, more than any of them have so far, and Matt kind of envies her for it. That immediate expulsion of feeling. He’s still stuck with the low buzz of wasted adrenaline.

“Shh, shh, shh shh shh,” Josh is saying mindlessly, his eyes not really on anything at all as he pats at her back. All Matt can see is the back of her blonde head, where she’s buried into his neck. “It’s fine, we’re all fine, look, the Congressman’s fine, I’m fine, we’re all—”

“Please say the word fine again, Josh,” says Lou, before groaning and bending over double, her hands on her knees. Helen looks up from where she’s on Matt’s shoulder, and delicately pushes herself away from him as she walks a few paces to Lou’s side. She helpfully pulls her hair away from her mouth.

Donna, meanwhile, is still sobbing. With another pat on the back from Josh (and Matt tries not to stare as Josh rubs his cheek down onto hers) she breaks off from him and turns towards where Matt is standing by the car. Her face is red and wet and ruined, and yet she’s still the beautiful woman that goes on T.V. for them. She sniffs, and tries to give him one of those Donna Moss smiles.

“Oh, Congressman Santos, I’m so— I’m sorry, _you_ should be the one upset here, I’m just being—”

Matt’s already got hands outstretched, shaking his head. “Don’t you worry about it, like Josh said, we’re all…”

He feels, more than sees, Lou look up from her crouch, with a villainous look on her face, and tactfully ends his sentence with, “good.”


	2. Chapter 2

Later (much, much later, after the Secret Service cleared the hotel and Helen laid down for a nap, after some frantic hours spent with the righteous anger of his campaign staff, after a press conference and a condemnation of “those who seek to stop progress with violence”— and he’s already heard buzz from a quickly-recovered Lou that this kind of event on the campaign trail might give them a boost with the left, with the Latinos, and certainly with the press)— later, he finds himself drained of energy and in the back of a quiet town car with Josh. They’re the last ones up and about, probably. Yellow street lamps race by as they make their way down the highway. They’re on the way back from the hospital, where he met with some of the pedestrians who were injured in the panic of the crowd. A few broken bones, but thank God, no one shot. There was no sign of the girl with the face paint. That was probably a good thing.

“It was a good idea,” Josh says, suddenly breaking into the silence, “you know, giving everybody a night off. It’ll do people some good.”

Matt snorts. “Yeah, if they actually do what I say.” He can imagine them still running around back at the hotel, all bright eyes and espresso in their veins, trying to spin the day’s events like it was any other day on the trail.

Josh shrugs, another one of his full-bodied movements, and says, “I don’t know. Probably a lot of ‘we almost died’ celebrating going on.”

Matt eyes him pointedly. “No one almost died, not really.”

Josh smiles, grimly. “Close enough,” he says.

They’re quiet again for another minute. Matt’s thinking about a lot of things: he’s thinking about Helen, about the kids and how scared they sounded on the phone, about getting back on the road tomorrow, about the girl with the red, white, and blue face. And he’s also thinking about the business card in his pocket. It’s actually one of Donna’s cards ( _Donnatella Moss, Press Secretary for the Campaign to Elect Matt Santos for President_ ) but on the back is a phone number, scrawled in her hasty hand. Beside it, a name he doesn’t recognize, except for what she told him _._

She came to him when he had a moment alone at the hotel. He hadn’t seen her much since they got back from the field— he was too busy talking to people and she was too busy talking to the entire American news cycle— but he’d spotted her and Josh, hovering around each other at various points throughout the afternoon. Standing beside each other in silence, eyes on the ground, chaos all around them. Leaning on each other every now and then. At one point he saw them bickering, her shoving herself into his line of sight even as he turned away, visibly frustrated even from across the room.

Matt looks at Josh again, where the man is crouched against the seat of the car, head bowed, hands in his lap. He never seems to use furniture like it was designed to be used by human beings— never able to fully relax, maybe. Matt flicks the business card in his pocket.

“Was Donna there, at Rosslyn?” Matt asks, breaking the quiet again.

Josh’s head jerks up, and there’s a shade of that boyish surprise there again. “Donna? No, no. No she wasn’t.” For a second he looks back down at his clasped hands, before saying, “She was at the hospital later, though, I’m told.” There’s a beat of quiet, and then Josh is looking outside, saying, “God, what’s taking so long?” When Matt looks, he can see road flares and flashing red lights. Local law enforcement has been on edge all evening. Plenty of roadblocks, even though they’re sure the perpetrator was of the lone-wolf variety. Matt hears car doors slam as somebody in one of the point cars gets out to talk to the officers.

They fall into silence again, Josh’s face cast in the glowing red of the lights outside the window. Matt’s thinking about Lyman and Moss. He never knows what to make of the pair. Lou was the one to hire her, giving Matt no other information except that she was brilliant, but he’d heard tell of the long and storied history that Donna had with his campaign manager, especially after the bitch fit that Josh threw when she came on board. Like the one he’d thrown when Matt brought on Amy Gardner.

Well, not quite like that. But close.

“You know,” Josh says, and Matt is the one startled, since he didn’t expect the man to speak again. “I never…I never forgave the press corps.” Matt blinks, frowning. That’s out of left field.

Josh is shaking his head. “I mean, I’ve seen the clips, from that night— and I mean, the 3:30, the 4:00 am, the 4:30 briefs—” he breaks off, pushing out air. “It’s only, what, five hours after..? I never forgave the press for how they treated C.J. that night. She was just shot at, for Christ’s sake, her hearing is shot, she’s practically got half a concussion, her neck is cut up, you can _see_ it on the tape— and still they badger her, I mean, they _bludgeon_ her in the press room.” He makes a sound of disgust. “They get shots of her looking distraught, and then they run stories about the goddamn Press Secretary looking distraught.”

Josh cuts off and it looks like it’s for good this time, as he stares out the window, fingers near his mouth.

Matt questions, tentatively, “Is that what you’ve been thinking about today?”

Josh doesn’t look at him when he replies, laughing a little under his breath. “I’m thinking about a lot of things today, I guess.” Josh rubs at his face, sounding exhausted as he asks, “And you, Congressman? How are you doing?”

Matt breathes out, slowly. “I’m okay, all things considered. Taking things in.” He frowns again. “It’s not the first time I’ve been under fire, it’s just the…context that’s bothering me.” He sighs. “And the fact that my wife was there in the middle of it.”

“Mmm,” Josh says, still looking lost in thought.

Matt stares at him, one finger on that business card. He doesn’t know how to broach the subject, not with any tact, so eventually he just…goes for it. “Donna was telling me you went through some personal issues after Rosslyn.”

Josh tenses up again, looking wide eyed, and then groans, “Congressman—”

He continues over him. “She was saying you went through…what anybody would have reasonably gone through, but that you ended up talking to—”

Josh tries again. “Congressman Santos, I’m—”

“You talked to,” Matt pulls out the card now, reading it again, “someone at ATVA? A Stanley Keyworth?”

Josh sighs, heavily. “Yes.”

Matt nods. “Donna thinks I should call him, have someone with their staff talk to our people.”

Josh’s eyes widen again, and Matt can see the relief in them. “Oh,” he says, obviously taken aback. “Well. That’s, that, might be…a good idea. If you’re interested in it.”

Matt stares him down. “She also thinks I should order you to call him. So that you talk with him. Just you.”

Josh’s face tightens, his lips thin. Matt thinks of the frantic way Donna had shoved the card at him back at the hotel, explaining quickly in that mile-a-minute way that she and Josh talked, stressing with the utmost care and emphasis that Josh _needed_ to talk to Stanley, he _had_ to, _you need to make him, Congressman,_ she’d said, with her big wet eyes _._

Josh and he stare at each other in silence for another moment, until suddenly the car starts moving and the lights outside fade as they drive away.

Some of the tension drains, the red lights gone, and Josh is left looking at their feet on the car floor.

It takes him a minute, but Matt has learned how to wait Josh out.

“I was…I was _fine_ after Rosslyn,” he says, and Matt gives him a withering stare. He doesn’t have the patience for that sort of prideful bullshit.

“No, no,” Josh says, insistent, “I was fine. I mean, aside from the physical— I was on bed rest and going kind of stir crazy for a couple months. Cabin fever. Donna could probably tell you some stories,” he says, trying for a wry smile, “about me driving everybody back in the White House nuts.” He finishes off with a pointed kind of sniff. “But I was fine.”

There’s another beat of silence, and then Josh sighs. “I was fine for, I don’t know, about a year. Until I wasn’t.” Josh swallows awkwardly, taking strides not to look Matt in the eye. “Donna was the one who…She’s the one who picked up on it. She told Leo on me,” and there he sounds a little peevish, eying Matt as if to say, _and she’s still going over my head_ , “and they were the ones to get me help.” He looks down again. “She was always looking out for me like that. If she hadn’t…well.” He shrugs. “I certainly wouldn’t be _here_ right now, doing this.”

He’s known Josh to speak in fluid paragraphs, 60 words per second, but those few sentences came out like pulling teeth. The man looks stonefaced, and pale, his face still tight. Matt just lets him sit.

They’re coming close to the hotel. It’s another few seconds before Josh breathes out a sigh, sounding more like himself, the political-automaton-Josh that Matt has come to know. He’s looking at Matt with tired, but friendlier eyes, when he says, “It’s a good idea, calling Stanley. I mean, for everybody. We didn’t do that in the Bartlet administration. Probably would have…headed some things off at the source, if we had.”

Matt looks at him for another moment, and then extends his hand out, offering the business card between forefinger and thumb. He keeps Josh pinned with his eyes. He watches Josh breathe out, maybe exasperated, maybe accepting of the inevitable. Maybe grateful. He reaches out for the card, and says a small, “Thank you.”

Matt smiles. “You should probably thank Donna.”

Josh smirks, staring down at the card in his hands. “When is that not the case?” he says, voice quiet.


End file.
